New Microsoft centres will help the company to meet worldwide demand
By Maurice Garvey
MICROSOFT have received planning permission to construct two data centres in Grange Castle – estimated to cost in the region of €280 million will also mean an addition of 180 jobs.
The US software giant received permission from South Dublin County Council to add two new buildings (comprising nearly 182,000 sq.ft. each) on its sites at Grange Castle Business Park, Clondalkin.
Microsoft opened its first data centre in 2009 at Grange Castle at a cost of approximately €600m – a recent expansion of that centre resulted in a colossal 500,000 sq.ft. facility.
Latest plans are for the two new single-storey buildings to be built on ready-to-use plug-in sites beside the existing Microsoft data centre at Grange Castle.
Microsoft expect to employ 180 full-time people at the new data centre, with up to 300 workers involved in the construction, a project expected to take 15 months to complete.
The two centres will replace six buildings permitted under a previous planning application, and also cater for the provision of an additional 257 car-parking spaces to serve the existing data centres.
The expansion will bring the company’s investment in the capital to about €1.2 billion, with facilities the equivalent of eight gaelic football pitches.
Microsoft said it needs the new data centre because even its own predictions for internet usage have been eclipsed.
In recent years, there has been an explosion in data centre development around Dublin with Grange Castle leading the way, and a location for global giants Google, Pfizer, Takeda and Grifols.
The new centre will allow Microsoft to meet an “ever-growing world-wide demand for the services it offers over the internet.”
The existing Microsoft data centre hosts about 200 core products, such as Office365, its Bing search engine, as well as its cloud development platform Azure.
Microsoft is engaged in a global project to link all its data centres together using a sub-sea fibre network.
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